Sensor motes are just one example of an increasing range of technologies capable of the “three geographic Cs”: capturing, communicating, and computing with information about geographic space.

Crucially, geosensor networks are a technology for “computing somewhere”: they present geographic constraints to both the capture and communication of information. The on-board sensors capture information about a node’s immediate environment. Energy and bandwidth limitations mean that nodes can typically only communicate directly over short distances, with other nearby neighbor nodes.